[This is part 1 in an article series on Sin, Repentance, and Revival. See part two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve]

Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris

There is a strong tendency among modern Christians to spiritualize, dilute, distort, and hollow-out nearly every major Christian concept, often to the point of stripping it of any real meaning and turning the political essence of these ideas—the anarchistic Gospel of the Kingdom of God that is in direct conflict with the kingdoms of false gods—into mere buzzwords that they obligatorily repeat. Rather than hearing the political message of Jesus as a call to repent of one’s faith, trust, and pledges of allegiance to man-made systems of human civil government and seek the literal Kingdom of God, the whole idea just becomes “the gospel” with no real political meaning behind it.

Such has been the fate of most every essential Christian concept in the hands of churchians and false prophets who were either blind to the truth still, under a strong delusion, or deliberately deceived others into believing in a lie. Such foundational concepts as sin are turned into the intrinsic and inescapable moral failings of a man that he needs to vaguely “repent” from, rather than concrete acts of rebellion against God that scripture lays out plainly; the idea of salvation, which scripture often shows as being delivered from the physical bondage of Egypt or exile under Babylonians or the enslavement under other statist systems, gets turned into a merely heavenly-minded idea of being saved from Hell when you die upon a mere profession of faith; the Gospel of the Kingdom of God, which is a radical political announcement of physical salvation under another King and literal Kingdom that is of the earth but is not of this world, gets reduced to the shorthand of “the gospel” that has no political implications whatever and is not contrasted at all against the false gospels of the false gods of the rival kingdoms of the world that promise peace, prosperity, and security under their presidents and legislators who have their own gospel promises; the idea of repentance, which scripture often shows as turning back from the specific acts of violence, idolatry, bloodshed, and wickedness involved in the political kingdoms of the world, is turned into “repenting” from some unclear, undefined, and inexact sins or wrongdoings that apparently have nothing to do with man’s whoredom and prostitution with the kingdoms of the world and their kings, armies, and other agents of the State; the idea of religion, which scripture defines as actually providing for and serving one another (James 1:27), is changed into one’s mere beliefs about God that get them to heaven or the dead rituals that one takes part in on Sunday morning in a so-called “church” that actually has nothing to do with worshiping God and seeking His Kingdom, despite conducting so-called “worship services.”

Politics and religion

What we aim to explore here is how the major concepts in modern Christianity have been so thoroughly diluted that a fundamentally political understanding of foundational ideas like sin, repentance, salvation, and the gospel is so unheard of and new to most people that professing Christians largely consider one to be wildly off-base or even “heretical” to espouse them. Hence why most of them today fight tooth and nail against any assertion that true Christians must be anarchists and that all statists are non-Christians: they don’t understand the Christian “religion” to be a certain political position of how society should be organized, nor the “church” as a body politic that redistributes the charity of families of people who organize their welfare in a way that makes the kingdoms of the world obsolete. For them, Christianity is just one’s “religion,” not another way of living as a Kingdom-people who are of the earth but who are not of the world; one’s “politics” is a wholly separate matter of a man’s more “practical” beliefs about how societies are to be organized on earth.

The entry of worldly statism into professing Christianity has been largely possible under an illegitimate division between politics and religion that allows men to adopt “political” ideas that contradict their alleged Christianity and decidedly prove themselves to be overt sinners, while reducing their “faith” or “religion” to nothing more than some spiritualized devotion to God that supposedly doesn’t provide a social ethic for how men must live, act, eat, and relate to one another.

In a world where politics and religion have been turned into separate and distinct concepts, realms, or practices, rather than things that are synonymous with one another (to the point that one’s ideas about how society should be organized explains everything we need to know about their religion), modern Christians see one’s “politics” as a different thing altogether from their “religion.” As such, they believe they can support human civil government for their law, justice, and welfare, without contradicting their “religion” on the other hand, which supposedly has nothing to do with how men serve one another. They do not see that the Christian religion is necessarily a political position expressing the belief that one is in favor of voluntary charity as their means of serving others as opposed to the compulsorily funded systems of legal charity that represents another religion, and thus they do not see that to profess to be of this religion necessarily compels a man to adopt anarchism as their “politics.” In other words, they don’t see why Christian Anarchism is a redundancy, because religion and politics have been understood as separate disciplines or realms of thought that do not cross each other.

The modern fragmentation of thought into multiple, narrow, specialized disciplines that occurred in the “secular” world of human thought more or less worked to compartmentalize “religion” into its own “spiritual realm” that detached its basic ideas (e.g., that human society should be organized on the basis of voluntary charity) from the supposedly more practical and political questions of how the needy of society are to be provided for. These supposedly distinct, important, and seemingly more down-to-earth questions became the domain of “politics,” which was to be carried out by human civil governments that supposedly did not practice a certain religion when they did this. This is how many statists who profess to be Christians today see defense, justice, law, and law enforcement as the domain of the “State,” while the “church” (a non-political entity in its current and fraudulent form) has the responsibility of merely “saving souls” and “preaching the gospel.”

It is no surprise how we got the modern “church” (so-called) of ritualistic dead religion under this thinking that religion had nothing to do with socio-political life and vice versa. When men abandon the idea of religious gathering and fellowship as people who are assembled together into a living, charitable network of believers who exist as citizens of God’s literal Kingdom who maintain a system of welfare as their practice of private religion and their means of keeping their people out of the bondage of the world that came when men took the tax-funded benefits of authoritarian benefactors of human governments, then there is nothing left for the “religious realm” than for dead man-made traditions and empty rituals to take the place of the void left by a people who have passed off all their responsibilities to serve others to human rulers. If one’s religion is not understood to be their political idea of how a people should be served, whether through the pure religion of private charity or the public religion of socialism, then mere ritualistic and performative acts like sitting in pews, singing songs, and listening to sermons becomes the idea of “worship service.” Christian “faith” and duty becomes nothing more than church attendance and claiming you “believe the gospel.” One’s “politics” becomes a set of beliefs or opinions one holds apart from their “Christian faith.”

In short, as politics and religion became separate ideas, men who professed to be Christians, who should be loving and serving one another as citizens of another Kingdom who practiced pure religion and remained unspotted from the world, came to think they may partake in the politics of the world without contradicting their loosely conceived “faith” or “religion” on the other hand. The modern idea that divides political, economic, religious, and social life into separate boxes more or less seeped into Christianity and distanced their idea of religion from loving and serving each other as a people who are citizens of another literal Kingdom, which then allowed men to partake in the politics of worldly kingdoms under the belief that this was a “civic duty” in their political life.

It has been under the mass distortion of all these concepts that it has become so difficult to show men that their statist beliefs and practices are sinful and contradict their claims to the Christian faith. In a world where most so-called Christians today are being trained-up by innumerable false pastors and false prophets in worldly institutions like churches, seminaries, public schools, and state universities, one is almost pissing against the wind to get men to see that the Gospel of God’s Kingdom stands directly opposed to the statist gospel of salvation under man’s kingdoms. The prophets of Baal, who outnumber the Elijahs one-million to one and surround the kingdoms of the world as their religio-intellectual bodyguards, got to them first and taught them that human civil government is wholly compatible with the Christian religion, when in truth nothing could be more contrary than God’s Kingdom and man’s.

God’s Kingdom vs. man’s kingdoms 

Here lies a major part of the problem. Since so few professing Christians think of the Kingdom of God as a literal political community standing apart from the authoritarian kingdoms of this world, which we are to seek on earth at the exclusion of the latter, and since so many of them were trained up by the false prophets of the institutions of the world rather than guided by an outnumbered Elijah preaching the anarchistic Gospel of God’s Kingdom that exists in direct competition with the gospels of worldly politicians, only a handful of Christians today have recognized that humanity’s greatest sin has always been political in nature — that man’s greatest rebellion against God has been turning away from His anarchistic Kingdom to chase after the violent, man-made political systems of the world.

It’s no wonder, then, that so many Christians have learned to pledge allegiance to worldly governments and place their faith and trust in human archists (rulers) to uphold law, justice, security, and welfare for them in their own slothful outsourcing of these responsibilities to human rulers: they have not seen the Kingdom of God as a literal Kingdom that exists in stark contrast to the kingdoms of the world, all which are raised up in sin. They have only ever known the violent, man-made kingdoms of the world of human rulers exercising authority over other men and funding their schemes through compulsory offerings, which they even conflate with being God’s perfect, ideal, and prescribed political community, rather than seeing that all the evils that flow from these systems are “ordained” only to act as a judgment against their sin. If the sins of men are not understood as being of a specific, political nature, then men will inevitably fall into the very sins and false theories of salvation that scripture condemns: they will trust in men and human governments to “protect and serve” them, and unwittingly buy into the gospels of false gods. 

With such a profound distortion of Christianity’s core ideas having been carried on for centuries or even millennia, it’s no surprise that most so‑called Christians today are largely unrepentant statist idolaters whose political ideology is indistinguishable from that of the non‑professing masses who, without contradiction or pretense, embrace the statist ideology of Egypt and openly reject the Lord as their King. They share a political philosophy with the self-called atheists of the world, rather than exist as a people apart from the pagans of the world and their pagan kingdoms. 

If “sin” is just some inherent errancy of mankind that lacks any concrete definition or specific actions and behaviors of men, then it should come as no surprise that men who claim to be repentant men are, in fact, overt and unrepentant sinners who still pursue all the great evils condemned in scripture as representative of breaking God’s Law and turning away from His rule. If “sin” is just some unspecified or general failure of mankind in “a fallen world,” then we shouldn’t be surprised to find men who regularly and proudly partake in the very sins condemned throughout Scripture, such as men who rock their cross necklaces right next to their “I voted” stickers and do not see themselves as utter hypocrites and reprobates who have turned from the Lord as their King. If it is not seen that chief among the sins of men is their adultery with the human governments of the world, then men will naturally see nothing wrong with acting like Babylonians and partaking in the politics of the devil’s governments, all while believing themselves to be repentant, reformed, and regenerated followers of the Lord.

The overt idolatry of many of most professing Christians today stems from this failure to ever define or understand concepts like sin, repentance, salvation, or the gospel, all which very much so have to do (respectively) with man’s political rebellion against God, turning from these ideologies and practices, being divinely delivered from the hands of worldly rulers, and believing that Jesus is the only legitimate King and Savior of men. Again, when “sin” is stripped of any conception of acts that specifically show men to abandon the pursuit of God’s Kingdom in favor of furthering man’s kingdoms, we find that the majority of professing Christians in America actively partake in all the specific sins that scripture calls men to turn away from — namely, their political rebellion where they have turned aside to false gods to save them through their devotion to human rulers, presidents, congressmen, soldiers, and police officers. All this is possible when “sin” is ill-defined and lacking any political component. For most Christians today, the idea of sin hardly encompasses anything more than some personal-moral failures or vices like drinking alcohol or smoking marijuana, all while the great sin of statism is completely off their radar. It often then becomes the case that non-sins take a foremost position and actual sins aren’t even on the table of discussion. 

The obscured meaning of sin today

There is more than one word that scripture uses to convey the idea of turning away from God, rebelling against Him, or otherwise going astray or backward from His will, which we often generalize as “sin” today (an additional problem to the tendency to lump some vague, ill-defined vices into “sin” and call it a day). One source identifies 6 nouns and 3 verbs to describe sin in the Old Testament, which means the things God hates are even more specific than typically portrayed by the men who give us a vague conception of man’s rebellion against God. There are probably more if we went even wider and looked into words that describe a people having, e.g., gone away backwards. The Hebrew words that are typically identified as closely relating to this general idea of turning away from God in some way get translated into English words such as sin, iniquity, rebellion, transgression, wickedness, or evil, all which describe some sort of condition of being out of harmony with God and His Law.

What’s relevant for the point we attempt to make here is that none of these words carry a vague or watered-down meaning as they often do among many modern Christians, who are largely statist idolaters that depend upon putting forth an ill-defined conception of sin so as to excuse their disobedience while pretending to have repented. Rather, these words regularly appear in passages about violence, bloodshed, idolatry, immorality, or in other concrete and specific violations of God’s Law, and not just some generalized sense of being imperfect or “falling short” of the righteousness of God. In fact, the Lord calls us to “be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48). So those who would try to justify their continued idolatry for human rulers under the idea that “we’re all imperfect” are already without an excuse.

As much as it benefits the statist idolaters of the world who profess to be Christians to define “sin” in an imprecise or general sense that does not leave them guilty for specific charges, Scripture regularly describes sinful people and actions in much more concrete terms than most so-called pastors, preachers, and prophets teach today, who have an incentive to lie and never get to the bottom of the truth with the people whom they deceive for a living: their phony or perverted jobs are on the line and the offering plate to fund their luxury cars and homes might stop filling up if they called people out of the so-called churches to become God’s Kingdom seekers instead.

Though the institutionalists today will, of course, not teach that the sins of mankind are more or less bound-up with their support for these institutions that they defend for a living (e.g., the State, the false churches, or the seminaries), Biblical descriptions of sin or its related concepts frequently appear in the context of the wickedness involved in erecting human rulers and human governments, ruling over other men, participating in the violence and injustices produced by these systems, and lusting after the armies of worldly governments to protect and serve you. Contrary to those who prefer to maintain an ill-defined conception of sin that allows them to avoid personal guilt, the sins and rebellions described in Scripture are rather specific and identifiable. They are not just “sins” without context, but are always found living in the text among descriptions of a people whose rebellion has been of a decidedly political nature, where they chased after human rulers, their governments, and the violence and corruption that comes with these systems, as opposed to making the Lord their King and seeking His Kingdom only. The words above that are used to describe sin in one way or another are frequently connected to things like idolatry, serving other gods (rulers), loving the injustices inherent in man‑made legal systems, and the disobedience to God’s commands that are found among men who go after the political ways of the world. 

In further articles, we will demonstrate further how the statist ideology—or idolatry—of men has been a primary sin and how repentance entails confessing this mostly unacknowledged sin and turning back to pledging allegiance to God’s Kingdom alone in repentance.